


Zero Sum

by kangeiko



Category: The West Wing, Watchmen
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-01
Updated: 2009-07-01
Packaged: 2017-10-05 15:02:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kangeiko/pseuds/kangeiko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of Jed's students catches his attention.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Zero Sum

**Author's Note:**

> For darlas_mom.

He likes his class for the most part, although there was a little too much meddling in their selection for his liking. They are not all uniformly intelligent, some having money in inverse proportions to reason and intellect, but they are at least all committed to working hard. He expects no less.

Abbey calls him out on what she calls his intellectual snobbery. "If they all work hard, then surely that puts them on an equal footing, Jed. You'll need to use that bell curve sooner or later," she says gently.

"There's no 'A' for effort at this level," he retorts, and wishes that better arguments existed for what he wants. His class is adequate, he thinks. _Adequate_. That's a word for meal sizes, or high school tests. (His were never merely 'adequate'.) It is important to many _adequate_ teens to bring home an _adequate_ report card, with _adequate_ effort expanded in all areas. Somehow the word loses its lustre when applied to a postgraduate macroeconomics course.

When he was younger, he went into this believing that each of his students has the same potential, the same possibilities waiting to be realised. Back then - when he was too young to know better, as his elders lamented - he thought that this meant simply encouraging the less privileged students in his class, trying to nurture their potential into world-changing, paradigm-shifting perspectives. It took him a long time (too long, given his premise of intellectual superiority) to realise that he'd pitched himself a little late in the game for such shifts.

Now, he sits in his office and goes over the registration roster. There are students from all backgrounds on his course, and none, _none_ of them have the inclination to be anything more than adequate. (He hadn't realised just how furious this fact makes him.) There is the majority of the class, full of Harvard and Yale grads, success written in the lines of their immaculate clothes and their luxury cars and their perfect hair. It's the private tutors and the extra tuition and the trips to Europe and Latin America and how they can turn in essays filled to the brim of first-hand experience, screaming for top marks and fighting over the valedictorian spot.

In any other situation, drawing straight As would be something remarkable. The thing is, much like shelling out for a nice car and expecting it to run well, when you spend that amount of money, excellence is simply _de rigueur_, and merely an adequate return on investment. In his mind's eye, he can see the columns tallying up: money in, achievements out, like a giant academic machine.

He thinks that he'd almost prefer it if one of these kids _wasn't_ doing well, just to break up the sameness a little bit.

There are two scholarship students in his class. He doesn't have the time to be interested in them both.

One is smarter than the rest of the class, turning in technically brilliant work that mark him out as a genius, or possibly autistic. If there is anything lurking beneath the scholarly exterior, Jed does not see it. He dutifully writes out the As and does not inquire further. For a genius, the boy's work is… adequate.

The other student is the one that draws his interest. He's younger than the others, with badly-cut fair hair and ill-fitting clothes. He is recently orphaned, his file says, and Jed wonders if this is what pushed him to the front of the queue. There is something a little too 'little orphan Annie' about him for Jed to be entirely comfortable; something a little too rehearsed, too full of faux-pathos. His work is too immaculate, too purposefully devoid of any personality for Jed to avoid mentioning it. "It feels like he's edited it out later," he tells Abbey when she inquires. "His opinion is there, all right, but he knows better than to express it."

"Knows better?"

"Well," he amends, smiling, "in any other class."

He keeps the boy behind one day. "My understanding was that this is an advanced theory class," the boy, Adrian, says. He sounds almost challenging, and Jed is cheered by this. "I didn't realise that _personality_ was required."

He ignores the insult and smiles instead. "If you can't tell anything about the difference in temperament between Keynes and Friedman through their work, then you deserve that B. Your work thus far has been merely - adequate."

Panic flashes in the boy's eyes at that. _B_. In this class, a fate worse than death, surely, but he says nothing. His eyes are cold, fixed as a shark's.

Adrian's next paper has some amusing stretches of the bounds of credibility, and a side-bar on the thorny issue of rational behaviour. It is almost insulting in its bloody-mindedness.

Immensely cheered, Jed gives him an A- and writes "much better!" in the margins, followed by three pages of contrary proofs taking apart all of the boy's tentative constructs.

"He sounds just like you," Abbey says when he tells her about it.

"He's not," he denies automatically before pausing to consider. "All right. How?"

She just laughs and kisses him. She smells of talc and antiseptic, the curious too-clean smell of the hospital creeping into her pores. She is four months pregnant and not showing yet, although Elizabeth has already figured out that she's getting a brother or sister and is badgering them to produce the baby _now_.

The next paper is stronger, angrier. Adrian seems determined to prove that he's not simply _adequate_, that he's not even the least bit ordinary. Jed approves of anger, it's done him many favours over the years. It seems to impair Adrian's logic quite a bit at first, but then it's out of his system and his work settles down: coldly brilliant and quite extraordinary by anyone's standards.

He gives in and awards him an A average for the semester, although he was severely tempted to give him an A- simply to keep him on his toes. Adrian smiled when he mentioned this, and stuck his hand out to shake. "I'll be looking forward to seeing more of your work in the future," Jed says on parting.

"I'll be sure to make it worth your while," Adrian says, and walks away.

He is left with the rest of his students (the vast, pampered majority), outraged to find themselves suddenly on a bell-curve.

*

It is twelve years later. The 'boy' is now a millionaire and a retired masked hero with a penchant for silly names, and Jed is still in the same building, with the same office and slightly later editions of the same textbooks. This is the last year of what he has come to accept as normality.

One afternoon, the world will - almost, nearly, not quite - end. He and his family will be safe, far enough from the epicentres to escape from all but the most distant tales and reports. He will watch the unfolding drama with his heart in his throat, his hand tight on Abbey's.

The next morning, he will receive two phone-calls. One will be from the university, offering him tenure. The other will be from an old friend of his, talking skywards of the Governor's mansion and rebuilding and of good men. He will look back to the TV, where Adrian Veidt will be gazing sorrowfully into the camera _(little orphan Annie, looking at the dying children with tears in her eyes)_, and talking about how terrible this all is, how strange and unpredictable. He will remember the boy's early papers.

That evening, he and his entirely family will pack up and move back to New Hampshire in time for candidate registration.

*

fin


End file.
